Lady of Weeds, page 34
part #2 of Lady Series
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A dream retreated, scurrying away with important thoughts that wouldn’t stay to be remembered. Stale, stuffy air tickled Poly’s nose. Something inflexible held her head in place, cupping it through the strands of her hair, and something warm and equally inflexible pressed against her lips. In between waking and sleeping, Poly came to the startling conclusion that she was being kissed. It was not a gentle kiss or a lover’s kiss, but a quick, hard, punctilious sort of kiss that suggested the kisser had better things to do and would like to get on with it, please.
She made herself lie still, heart pounding, until the pressure lessened. Then she vigorously jabbed her knee up into the kisser’s stomach. There was a pained huff of air in her face and the intruder curled defensively, groaning. Poly whipped herself away, ripping through bedclothes that tore like rotten wool as she half-fell, half-scrambled to the floor.
Her glasses weren’t on her nose where they ought to have been, leaving the world a confusing blur of grey and gold without sense or structure. Poly stumbled through the blur with her arms outstretched, feeling a whispy tickle of cobwebs—or was that hair?—across her fingers, and thought that the flagstones beneath her feet sank slightly.
There was a shuffling behind her, then someone’s arms grabbed for her waist. Poly stomped frantically in the general direction of her assailant’s feet, and felt the heel of her shoe crush his toes. He shouted in agony and Poly tore herself away, stumbling towards a bulky blur that seemed to be the bed. Her skirts were confusingly voluminous and fine, catching at her ankles, and a silky curtain of what Poly was almost certain was hair swirled around her as she ran behind the bed. From the safety of the bed, she squinted hopelessly at the fuzzy outline of the intruder. He seemed to be clutching his foot.
“Who are you?” she demanded, skirts bunched in both hands and ready to run again if he moved.
“She told you not to forget,” he said, bitterly. By the movement of his foot, he was cautiously trying to ascertain if she had broken his toes.
Poly felt an entirely vicious satisfaction. “What are you doing in my bedroom?”
“I came to rescue you,” he said, gingerly setting the injured foot down. “And I didn’t expect to be lamed, either. I thought princesses were meant to be charming.”
“I don’t need rescuing from bed, thank you very much,” Poly said, her voice very slightly wobbling. It was discomposing to find that she had gone to bed fully dressed. It wasn’t even her dress, she thought briefly, finding that her fingers were nervously clutching fine, cool satin.
Then it occurred to her that the wizard thought she was the princess. She stiffly released the fabric, her stomach twisting, and grasped at the bedhead instead. It was soft beneath her clutching fingers, and when she staggered forward a little at the unexpectedness of it, it collapsed into soggy dust, bereaving her at once of both support and cover.
“Now you’ve done it,” said the fuzzy figure disagreeably. “The whole place’ll start, now. I wish you’d stop darting about: I’m not going to chase you over and under the furniture. Don’t you want your glasses?”
Poly did, badly. Standing in a pile of disintegrated bed with something hairlike whispering terrifyingly around her, she wanted them so earnestly that she was somehow not surprised to find them in her hand. And yet, disintegration and hairlike tickle blurrily threatening seemed better than the idea of seeing the threat in all its real danger, and Poly hesitated. It was only when she saw the intruder straighten and step toward her that she made herself shove her glasses back on her nose, smudges and all.
The world sprang into sharp focus, making it desperately hard to ignore the long black tendrils that danced and swayed in her peripheral. Poly focused her gaze somewhat tremulously on the wizard, her shoulders stiff with fear, and saw that he was looking distinctly offended.
“How did you do that?” he demanded.
A long black strand curled around Poly’s wrist softly, and she swallowed. In a little above a whisper, she said: “Do what?”
“Don’t do that, either,” he said; but Poly, who had already taken one step backwards, then another, found herself walking into a small mahogany table.
No: through it. The table collapsed softly in half and crumbled to dust, coating the hem of her satin dress. Poly, stumbling backwards with her arms desperately outstretched for balance, stepped on something that jerked her head backwards painfully, and tumbled into the dusty mess.
There was hair everywhere. She was sitting in it, surrounded by it, her palms resting against it when she pushed herself up from the flagstones. Poly whimpered, a necessary weakness to prevent the greater one of screaming, and raised shaking hands to comb through what should have been chin length hair.
It was no longer chin length. Her fingers, patting downwards from the pate of her head, met with hair strands to her shoulders, then her ribs, then her waist, until she lost the flow of it in the swirls of hair she was sitting on. She’d trodden on her own hair.
“My—hair—”
“Yes, yes, princess, very impressive; but we need to go now.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” said Poly, her eyes wide. Her hair was moving in gentle little undulations that stirred the dust and caught in the sharp edges of the flagstones. She looked down at her fingers, hoping to see translucent magic dripping from them, but they were frighteningly normal.
“Real, then,” she said. “Why is my hair moving?”
“Huh,” he said. “Interesting. What have you done to it?”
“What have I done to it? Nothing! Why is it moving?”
“You can’t sit there and play with your hair. The castle is falling down.”
“It’s double-blocked and reinforced with multiple layers of magic,” said Poly, breathing too fast. “It can’t be falling down.”
She knew the castle couldn’t be falling down. It was ridiculous to consider the thought. But the air was thrumming oddly—had been doing so for some time, she thought—and when Poly looked around, gathering her wits, she saw that the room was disintegrating. Wall hangings were dropping softly to the flagstones in soft, woolly pieces, dressers were making wood scented piles of dust around the room, and great, sandy waterfalls tumbled from the top of each wall as the stones crumbled. Even the flagstones beneath her feet felt fragile. With the corrosion came a sense of strong, ancient magic, and Poly knew with certainty that she was no longer in the time she had been in yesterday. Years—no, centuries must have passed to make the castle collapse like this. She knew that everyone she had ever known was dead and gone; and that, strangely, the wizard had been telling the truth. He had come to rescue her.
There was a prickling across her skull. Poly saw her hair rise and unfurl in peripheral, threading through the stale, humming air, but her eyes were heavy and it was difficult to feel as frightened as she should have felt.
“The castle is falling apart,” she said quietly.
“Told you so,” said the wizard. The words didn’t quite seem to match the shapes his lips were making, and she wondered if she was in shock. “Magic was the only thing holding it up: now that the spell’s broken, the stored time will crush it to powder. We need to leave.”
Poly saw the golden pulse of magic that meant he was about to Shift them both from the castle, and resisted instinctively. There was a bright point in the room that was pulling at her. The room itself, unfamiliar and familiar all at once, prodded at her consciousness, forcing her to think.
Poly felt the wizard’s magic tug at her again, and resisted still. The wizard had called her princess, and she was certainly in the princess’ room. The satin ensemble; that was the princess’, too. But that bright spot—three rectangular aberrations in the dust of an old bookshelf—ah, that was hers.
Poly dug the rectangles out of the dust and found herself looking down at three books. Her books, to be precise. The princess had taken these three some time ago when Poly had been so foolish as to admit they had once belonged to her enchantress mother. Persephone was always resentful when someone proved more interesting than herself, and when it was discovered that Poly hadn’t inherited the enchantress trait, her difficulties doubled. Persephone’s jealousy, not to mention a nasty way with magic, had made Poly’s life a short, interesting, and bitter one as the princess’ lady-in-waiting.
She was still gazing at her books when the wizard’s voice said in her ear: “What did you do to my spell?”
Poly hunched her shoulders against the tickle of his breath on her ear. “I didn’t do anything to it.”
When she turned around the wizard was looking at her with glassy, distant eyes. “Yes, you did. You’re a very bothersome young woman.”
Poly would have liked to tell him that if his spells didn’t work it was his own fault, but she had learned from bitter experience that it was unwise for a person without magical abilities to antagonise those who did. The princess had made the lives of her ladies-in-waiting unpleasant enough, but that two of those ladies-in-waiting also had magic while Poly didn’t, had made her the odd man out. She had learned very quickly that there are a hundred ways in which someone with magic can make someone without very uncomfortable.
Poly yawned and swayed slightly. The thrumming had become a steady hum in her head, lulling her to sleep even as she delved through her memories. An insistent prodding in one shoulder woke her slightly: the wizard was poking her experimentally with his forefinger.
“Oh, you are awake,” he said, tilting his head back to gaze at her as though he were inspecting an insect.
Poly blinked sleepily and frowned, her hair rising and curling in the air. She distantly felt the wizard slide between tendrils of her hair to curl one arm around her waist, then there was a swift, disorienting Shift, and they were outside the castle. Poly, jolted forcibly back into the present by the sudden change, watched in shaken silence as the castle collapsed in a mushrooming cloud of dust and rubble. Her hair blew up and away in a rush of dusty air that made her sneeze, then gradually wafted back around her. She thought it was still moving slightly even when the breeze petered out.
The wizard was picking about in the rubble when it came to Poly’s attention that something sharply uncomfortable was digging into her ribs. She shook herself, eyes heavy, and blinked down at the three books that were clasped in her arms. They were the same size and neatly stacked, corners safely pointing outwards, but as she pulled them away from herself, something rolled woodenly across the cover boards. Poly caught it before it fell into the rubble and found herself holding a small wooden spindle. It had delicate curls carved into the whorl and a design of leaves etched along the barrel: a spindle for decoration, not real use.
The wizard looked up from his rubble-trawling. “What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Poly said automatically, curling her fingers back around it.
He shrugged and turned his back, gazing away from the castle. Poly looked up, conscious of a feeling of stifling closeness, and discovered that an impossibly tall, thorny hedge had grown up where the moat used to be. So tall and curving was it that it blocked both light and sight of the first two suns in the triad. The weakest, third sun was still in sight, but it was setting and its light was more drear than bright.
Poly clutched her books closer in cold disbelief, following the line of the hedge until she could see that it stretched around the entire castle, pile of rubble that it now was. The stillness in the air suggested that it was miles thick. Poly swallowed, her throat dry. What in the world had happened to the castle, and why did it feel like it was her fault?
“How did you get through that?” she asked the wizard, finding a more comfortable question to ask.
“The incantation they used had a mistake in it,” the wizard murmured, looking at her with unfocused eyes and then away again without recognition. “Shut up. I need to find it again.”
Poly frowned, pushing up her glasses. If there had been a mistake in the incantation, it had righted itself.
“Wizard.” His eyes were still unfocused, and Poly could see his magic pushing at the thorn hedge. A little louder, she repeated: “Wizard?”
“Luck.”
“Pardon?”
“Luck,” he repeated, pushing her aside to prowl further along the hedge. “It’s my name. Use it. I’m not a wizard.”
“Luck, then,” persisted Poly. She’d put a lot of effort into being invisible at the castle, but it was quite another thing to be ignored on sight and without effort. “There isn’t a gap in the hedge magic anymore.”
That made his eyes focus sharply on her, and she saw with some interest that they were deep green instead of gold as she had first thought. He said: “Can you see the hedge magic?”
“Of course!” Poly said, surprised. She had thought that everyone could see and touch magic as easily as they saw and touched water.
“Interesting!” he said, and promptly turned his back on the hedge to gaze rather disconcertingly at her. Poly found that she preferred being looked at as though she wasn’t there. The way Luck was looking at her made her think of the way Wizard Timokin used to look at his dissection specimens: interesting, but just a specimen after all.
Luck’s magic grew immensely, surrounding her, and Poly felt her hair rising and spreading out tendrils to meet it. Gold threads mixed with the silky black threads of her hair, joyfully twining together with a buzz that startled her, and Luck gave a short, sudden yelp. “What did you do?”
“N-nothing,” Poly stammered.
“Yes, you did,” contradicted Luck, frowning. “What have you done to my magic? It’s gone all peculiar.”
The force of his magic became narrower, more subtle; probing at her memories, her thoughts. Then it was sliding, cold and precise, into her consciousness.
Poly gasped and slapped at the magic. Luck yelped again, this time in pain, and snatched the tendrils back into himself. “Stop that!”
His magic, which was swirling angrily about his person, now bore a slightly brownish tint.
“You’ve no business poking at my mind,” Poly said fiercely. She knew that she had hit back harder than the offence warranted.
“Why is it that every time I touch you, you slap me?” wondered Luck.
“I didn’t slap you,” Poly protested, flushing. The way he managed to construe everything as her fault was off-putting. “I kicked you, and it was because you kissed me. I don’t go around just kicking people, you know.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me,” Luck remarked. “Nothing about you would surprise me. You’re a horribly violent princess.”
Poly, gasping at the unfairness of it, took far too long to think of a reply.
At last, she said sourly: “My name is Polyhymnia. You might as well call me Poly if we’re being so informal.” She didn’t want to secede the title of Princess until she knew why Luck was addressing her by it, but it was jarring to hear the title every other time he spoke to her.
Luck blinked. “Huh. Alright,” he said, and added: “Stay still, I want to try something.”
He did something tricky with his gold magic and Poly found herself imprisoned in a closed spell circle.
“Let me go at once!” she demanded, hot and cold by turns with anger and fear. It wasn’t the first time she had been captured in a spell circle: the Princess had been fond of using them to carry out punishments. Living with the princess had taught her very quickly that rugs on the floor were best travelled around rather than over, and that one’s bed should always be thoroughly inspected unless one actually liked being strangled by one’s bedclothes or snuggled in the clammy embrace of a faintly smirking selkie who was just as surprised to find himself in bed with a human girl but by no means as unwilling.
Therefore, it was with something approaching terror that Poly saw a golden tide flood Luck’s eyes. His magic gathered strength with truly horrifying speed, and a great, pulsing mass of power hurtled toward her. Poly shrieked and instinctively, ridiculously, threw up her hands to catch it. She found herself with a glowing gold mass cupped between her hands, her heart pounding madly in her ears. Her hair roiled around her in a state of excitement, a span longer than it had been when she woke.
Luck was laughing gleefully, to her indignation. “Wonderful! This is supposed to be impossible. Dear Polyprincess. No, stop wriggling, I haven’t finished yet.”
Poly was about to tell him furiously that he had better be finished, when another surge of magic hurtled toward her. There was no catching it or stopping it: it was a solid wall of magic, just waiting to break. Her hair unfurled to meet it and the two met with a shock Poly felt to her bones. Her breath caught in the back of her throat, but this time it was with a sigh of contentment, not fear. It was gone just as suddenly as the first lot, and Poly’s hair was once again heavy with magic, streaks of silky gold among the dusky strands.
Luck gazed at her, an odd look in his eyes. “Magic likes you. My magic likes you. Huh.”
Poly ran a lock of hair through her fingers, feeling the silkiness of the magic. It refused the call of her fingers and sank deeper into the strands. She could feel a powerful, painless pulling at her hair and knew that it was Luck trying to call his magic back to him. It resisted his call as well, hair and magic thread merging indistinguishably with each other. A few moments later her hair was the same slate black it had always been, and Luck was standing by the thorn hedge, watching her with narrow eyes.
“I’ll want that bit of magic back later,” he said.
“It wouldn’t let go,” Poly said, but she wasn’t sorry. “I did try.”
Luck flickered and was suddenly, invasively closer, a coil of her hair curled around his fingers. “It’s growing,” he said, in interest. “It was shorter in the castle, and shorter again when we were in your dream. I think some of the sleep spell is still holding on.”
Poly had a nightmarish vision of herself sleeping again, perhaps for hundreds of years, and the slight fuzziness in her head cleared long enough for it to occur to her that she didn’t know how long she had been asleep. In the moment of clarity it seemed to her that there was something else she should be remembering; something important, something too dangerous to be left unremembered. Poly tried to force the memory but the fuzziness in her head was too thick. She sighed, and asked Luck the one question she could remember.
